Statues don’t say much, but they keep making the same point forever

I was in Cary, North Carolina and in a very bad mood.

We had flown in for top-end fertility treatments in that insanely wealthy city, and they failed. 

Another bunch of geniuses had pledged they were the best shot we’d have at “a take-home baby,” but we’d be just taking ourselves home. As usual.

I kissed my wife as she slipped off to sleep, and drove 12 miles to Raleigh, where I could get some work done.

There, I couldn’t help seeing several well-maintained Confederate monuments. I was not ready for that sight, because Raleigh and the rest of the academic-oriented Research Triangle seemed to be as populated with transplanted Chicagoans as with locals. But that, of course, was a relatively new phenomenon.

I walked up to the most impressive monument, raised 30 years after the end of the Civil War, and thought to myself, “This is all about intimidation. This thing was put up to make sure people knew, even though the Confederates lost, the white guys were still in charge. For goodness sake, it’s right in front of what looks like the state capitol building.”  

It was very hot and I was tired and had the aforementioned bad attitude, all of which made me impatient. I accosted a nearby police lieutenant and demanded,  “What is this thing for? Didn’t they know they lost the war?”

The cop stared at me for a moment. Then he said, “This is a memorial for Confederate dead. 

“The Civil War was a meat grinder, you know. 

“Most of the soldiers didn’t own slaves. They were told they were protecting their homes, their way of life.

“The ones who made it back returned to ruin.

“This,” he said, referencing the monument, “is all they got.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

I stood alone in the blazing heat and felt ashamed. I still hated the monuments. But I felt like a jerk. 

I was very upset because one child, my child, was not going to be born, and about the suffering of my wife, and all that money spent for nothing. But I was numb to the hundreds of thousands of Confederate dead, who were somebody’s babies once, too.

There had been a spectacular number of  soldiers who survived without one or more of their arms or legs. I hadn’t thought at all about that, either, because I didn’t know, not until I did some research over big bottles of stout at a Raleigh bar. 

That’s also where I learned that nearly all of Columbia, S.C., not far away, had burned as William T. Sherman’s troops came through at the end of the Civil War. His soldiers looted or wrecked what was left.

The Raleigh monument should never have been built. There was a sore need for money for education and other priorities in those post-Reconstruction days, not for 75-foot-tall columns with a soldier from a racist war standing on top.

But I’d seen dead men. The dead deserve respect. 

I’d seen wartime amputees and burned buildings. Nobody deserves that kind of disaster. 

We may refer to the rebels as traitors. They fought for secession, after all. But they fought to secede because they were preserving the right to hold slaves. That awful right was protected in the U.S. Constitution. It had been affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision before the Civil War started.

The survivors of the soldiers honored by the monument are long dead, and the monument should come down, and it has. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper was already longing to remove it when demonstrators pulled down the two statues at its base. That may be a little unseemly, since the monument is a memorial. But after all, North Carolina allowed over 100 lynchings. That’s a bit unseemly, too.

A few blocks from my home, there’s a big memorial area for Union soldiers in Chicago’s landmark Rosehill Cemetery. A cemetery would also have been a better place for the Raleigh monument than towering over the building where the state’s laws were crafted until 1961.

I bet if state legislators didn’t have to see it every day it wouldn’t have been so tall. Unnecessarily big things speak volumes to the people who walk underneath them.

Other American statuary and monuments and traditions that have come under fire recently may not be as obviously inappropriate. 

The equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, flanked by subservient - looking figures of a Native American and an African, will go away from its long-held place of honor in front of New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The bizarrely racist name of the Washington, D.C., football team will finally disappear, too.

I keep hearing, “Where does it all end?”

It’s not hard to decide, if I’m the decider, as President George W. Bush used to say. The Washington Redskins is an easy call. Redskins? C’mon.

Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians? A screaming cartoon representing real people will never cut it.

The Chicago Blackhawks sweater? That one seems respectful and beautiful. If there’s some detail of the logo that is disrespectful, fine, but it’s not obvious. 

There’s one difference between the first two and the third, all taken from the lore surrounding Native Americans. 

The Redskins name and Chief Wahoo hold them up to ridicule. They have the stink of shame and embarrassment and dehumanization.

The Blackhawks sweater is cool. I can imagine a Chippewa going to a sporting goods store and buying one. 

But I’m not the one to say. I’m not the decider.

The Theodore Roosevelt statue should go, because it’s very, very demeaning. But maybe not all Roosevelt statues. He was the greatest White House conservationist and he busted the trusts. He was a bit of a racist, too, but when you think of him, that’s not what you think of. At least I don’t.

Statues, on the whole, glorify people like gods. Statues seem to be about worship, not history. 

There’s a lot of history in Raleigh. For North Carolinians, the Civil War began and ended in the little patch of Piedmont where The Triangle much later became the innovation engine of the South.

North Carolina, torn about secession, didn’t approve it until a convention voted for it May 20, 1861, more than a month after the hostilities actually began at Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861. The convention was held at Raleigh’s old state capitol building, built in 1840, and still in good shape today.

The building houses Cooper’s office, and there are tours that describe North Carolina history.

The Civil War effectively ended at Bennett Place, a farmhouse in modern-day Durham, 30 miles away.

Robert E. Lee had surrendered April 9, 1865, to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. But a much larger, intact Southern army still operated in and around the Carolinas, and its leader, Joseph E. Johnston, cut a better deal with Sherman April 18. It represented the more “compassionate and forgiving end” to the war that Abraham Lincoln had planned.

But Lincoln had just been assassinated, and Grant related that the previous month, the president had decided that the surrender should involve only military matters. On April 26, Johnston signed a new surrender document reflecting that, against the orders of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. 

Bennett Place was the site of both signings. Destroyed by neglect and fire, it was rebuilt and restored over the years. Owned by the state, it now houses “The Dawn of Peace” theatrical program about the end of the Civil War.

It tells more history than any monument or statue. It moves and speaks and explains itself.

If it’s inaccurate, it can be edited. Try doing that to bronze or granite. 

Statues always have to have the last word. Sometimes, that word is very hurtful. But they say it over and over until somebody has the decency to shut them up.